SEOUL, South Korea (AP):
FOUR YEARS after the two Koreas held a landmark summit, the international dispute over the North's nuclear ambitions overshadows their reconciliation efforts, amid concern that progress in talks on the stand-off is unlikely ahead of the U.S. presidential election in November.
A round of six-nation talks on North Korea's efforts to develop nuclear weapons is expected next week in Beijing, but two previous rounds have yielded little progress beyond establishing the sharp differences between the two main adversaries, Pyongyang and Washington.
Still, the inter-Korean reconciliation process has plodded forward since the summit on June 13-15, 2000 between North Korean leader Kim Jong II and Kim Dae-jung, the South Korean president who won a Nobel Peace Prize largely because of his campaign to engage the isolated North. The achievement, however, was marred by revelations that the North received illegal payoffs from the South in exchange for hosting the summit.
A group of about 100 North Koreans arrived in Seoul on Monday to mark the fourth anniversary of the summit. The delegates planned activities commemorating the meeting of the Kims, who had said they hoped it would leave to eventual reunification.
That emotional goal remains distant more than half a century after the Korean Peninsula was divided. But the two sides have taken incremental steps to reduce tension, staging regular reunions of separated family members and launching the construction of railways and roads across the Demilitarised Zone that separates the Koreas.
On Monday, warships from the North and South exchanged radio messages for the first time following a recent agreement aimed at reducing the risk of clashes in disputed waters off the west coast. Earlier this month, the two Korean militaries agreed to adopt a standard radio frequency and signalling system for their navies
They also agreed to end propaganda along their land border. Loudspeaker broadcasts will be stopped, and signboards will be dismantled, beginning this week.
"Tension has been greatly eased between the two Koreas," Kim Dae-jung, whose single, five-year term ended early last year, said at a meeting of the World Economic Forum in Seoul on Monday.
However, the reconciliation process remains vulnerable to tension over the nuclear stand-off, which some politicians and other experts in Washington view as a challenge to global security on a par, or even greater than, the conflict in Iraq.
